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Native advertising

The IAB and Edelman Berland surveyed 5,000 consumers of business, entertainment and general news as to their perceptions of native advertising.

Nearly nine in 10 (86%) consumers feel that online advertising is necessary to receive free content online. Additionally, 60% of consumers are more open to online ads that tell a story than ones that simply sell a product.

Sponsored content awareness was around 70%.

Does sponsored content add value?

Although respondents seem to suggest more often than not the content doesn’t add value, they believe that placing in-feed content enhances the brand reputation.

This perhaps points to this being a good time for brands to jump on board the native advertising train.

Online TV

As you can see from the chart below, subscription view on-demand services are rapidly increasing their revenue. Free-to-view ad revenues are also increasing, perhaps fuelled by the increase in tablet computers in UK households.

(Click to enlarge)

Digital display

More from Ofcom. Digital display advertising grew more than 22% in 2013. The chart below shows how bullish Google’s control of advertising is, considering it accounts for the majority of the nearly £3.5bn spent on paid search.

Mobile and paid search

38% of all clicks on paid search ads in the UK are from mobile devices, according to research from Kenshoo into Q2 2014 data from 6,000 advertisers and agencies.

Recommended

This refers to the drop-down menus that are generally situated within the horizontal navigation at the top of a webpage.

Web trends and UX design have changed in the intervening years, in large part due to increasing consumer adoption of mobile and new technologies such as responsive design, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit those same sites to see how they’ve evolved.

Smartphones can support impulsive purchasing – browsing a retailer’s website while waiting in a supermarket queue and clicking ‘buy now’, for instance.

Meanwhile, the widespread use of tablets as second screens presents the opportunity to make purchases, perhaps in response to advertisements, from the comfort of your sofa.

Digital window-shopping, or showrooming, is common among smartphone users and often leads consumers into physical stores to try on or test products, or to making online purchases from another device at another time.

Ugg is launching a multimedia campaign, promoting its footwear as part of an idealised lifestyle.

Check out the video embedded below to get an idea of the brand position (the ad feels like a sort of gooey Guinness advert crossed with a Lands End catalogue).

With this new campaign afoot (no pun intended), I thought I’d take a look around the brand’s web presence and see how it stacks up.

The conclusion is that there’s a lot to improve upon in Ugg’s digital strategy. Part of maintaining a premium lifestyle brand is doing digital well. Having said that, no doubt the new campaign, with its well produced videos, will revitalise the brand if given enough media exposure.

The battleground has changed since the 1980s. We no longer look to the highway billboards, the ads in National Enquirer or the million-dollar Bill Cosby endorsements on MTV to witness the blows each corporation delivered to its aluminium coated opponent.

Now the war is fought across a vastly different field. One that couldn’t possibly have been predicted 30 years ago when our sole interests lay in watching Michael J Fox climbing over cars in the rain.

We imagined future battles taking place on the moon, or via a Virtual Reality headset or at least a vaguely futuristic looking air-hockey table. We were wrong.

Social media is the modern day arena where all the most catastrophic shots are fired (we now call them tweets). It’s also where loyal troops are enlisted (we now call them Facebook friends) and collateral damage is a sad yet necessary outcome (we call it Google+).

So let’s see how these mighty warriors are squaring up to one other in the 21st Century and how much attention they are paying to the rules of engagement.